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Alex Sherman

Alex Sherman is the co-founder and chief executive of Bluefish, a New York-based platform that helps large brands understand and influence how artificial-intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and Amazon Rufus describe their products to consumers [1][2][3]. He describes Bluefish as a marketing engine built for what he calls the "generative internet," arguing that AI represents a new marketing channel of the kind that has historically emerged roughly every five to seven years, following the earlier rise of search, social, and mobile [11]. According to Sherman, this shift compressed into an unusually short window, with major platforms from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta launching AI products within a six-to-twelve-month period and rapidly moving AI-driven shopping and product discovery from a niche behavior to a mainstream one, a shift he says has become a top-three priority for chief marketing officers at Fortune 500 companies [10][12]. He positions Bluefish's platform as giving marketing, search, content, and public-relations teams real-time analytics on how AI models portray their brands relative to competitors, along with tools to shape the content that trains those models' understanding of a brand [11][12].

Sherman raised a $20 million Series A for Bluefish, led by NEA investor Amber Bordetsky, and founded the company in February 2024 [11][3]. Before Bluefish, he spent over a decade building PromoteIQ, which he co-founded in 2012 and led as chief executive until its acquisition by Microsoft, after which he continued as founder and general manager of the Microsoft-PromoteIQ unit until 2022 [6][5]. Earlier in his career he worked as a product manager at MediaMath, having entered the technology industry in 2009 after graduating from Columbia University during the global financial crisis, when he says conventional corporate career paths were largely unavailable [7][10][8]. He has also been an angel investor at Bastille Capital since 2021 [4].

Sherman studied modern European history at Columbia, a choice he attributes in part to his mixed French, German, and American family background, and he has said he approaches enterprise software as fundamentally a service business grounded in customer needs rather than technology for its own sake [8][10]. He frequently uses the metaphor of a "pirate ship" to describe startups, characterizing them as inherently improbable, under-resourced challengers set against large incumbent players, and framing entrepreneurship as requiring comfort moving between different worlds and audiences, from AI researchers to enterprise clients to internal teams [10].

Founded

Insights & ideas

Alex Sherman argues that AI search has rapidly become an essential marketing channel, moving from a niche experiment to a top-three priority for Fortune 500 CMOs within about two years [1]. He frames Bluefish as "the marketing engine for the generative internet," giving brands visibility into how systems like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and Amazon Rufus describe and recommend their products, and tools to influence those outcomes [2][3]. A recurring theme is his historical pattern-matching: every five to seven years a new channel (search, social, mobile) emerges that marketers initially dismiss before realizing consumers have moved there, and he sees AI repeating this cycle but in a highly compressed six-to-twelve-month window as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta launched AI products simultaneously [2][3]. He contends consumers embrace AI because it removes the complexity of traditional search, and that brands must now understand what shapes model outputs and build content to "teach" those models [2][3]. He also stresses that enterprise software must be built as a service business rooted in customer needs rather than technology alone [1].

Experience

  1. CEO and Co-Founder
    Bluefish AIFeb 2024 to Present
  2. Angel Investor
    Bastille CapitalJan 2021 to Present
  3. Founder and General Manager of Microsoft-PromoteIQ
    MicrosoftJul 2019 to Apr 2022
  4. CEO and Co-Founder
    PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft)Mar 2012 to Apr 2022
  5. Product Manager
    MediaMathSep 2009 to Mar 2012

Education

Media & appearances

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